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Secure Information Exchange Featured Article

November 09, 2012

Enterprise Information Management the Next Big Thing

By Mae Kowalke
TMCnet Contributor

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Google (News - Alert) has shown the power of wading through the sea of data on the internet. There’s another sea of data waiting to be conquered, however, one currently locked in servers nationwide – corporate data.

Of course, some of the corporate data collected every day is being used by analytics platforms, but much of it still is floating relatively freeform – there’s a world of unstructured data that is untapped, and there’s greater value to be extracted as well from structured data such as SAP (News - Alert).

That’s where enterprise information management (EIM) enters the picture, and enterprise content management provider OpenText is there with an EIM to corral and make sense of the data.

EIM converges enterprise content management, business process management, collaboration and social media, customer experience management and discovery into a single solution that corporate decision makers can use to keep track of and leverage the data in a unified manner.

“With growing volumes and a host of formats to manage and leverage, organizations need to bring structure to the unstructured,” according to the OpenText website. “By doing so, they will be unleashing the power of information to drive faster decision making, improved agility, strong security policies, and an increased ability to both exploit the opportunities and control the risks of enterprise information.”

EIM helps organizations in several key ways, according to OpenText.

First, it brings business insight.

“Often silos are created as information is fragmented across different departments, repositories, and processes,” noted the OpenText website on business insight. “By uniting different data sets, EIM delivers the analytical capabilities required to effectively align processes, provide deeper insight into information, and enable more effective decision making.”

Second, it provides process velocity, integrating existing information, processes and applications into a single solution.

EIM also leverages globalization, social decision-making and the consumerization of IT by tapping into unstructured data such as social networks. And it helps enterprises comply with new and stricter government regulations on data practices.

Perhaps as important as providing business insight, EIM also assists with secure information exchange by supporting information security.

“In the WikiLeaks world we live in and the mounting threat of cyber-attacks, sacrificing information security is not an option,” according OpenText. At the heart of EIM, noted OpenText, is “an uncompromising principal that security is critical. The consequences of loose policies, inadequate permission and access control capabilities, and flawed design are simply too great.”

EIM helps find and control data, making sure that security is not compromised.

Those five benefits add up to something much larger than just content management or business intelligence.

“Enterprise Information Management (News - Alert) is the next big thing,” enthused OpenText CEO Mark Barrenechea in a video about EIM. “Organizations need a single source of truth for all unstructured information and OpenText is committed to making sure our customers are on the leading edge of competitiveness.”